Simpler Syntax

Abstract

A syntactic theory for natural language provides an account of the correspondences that hold between phonology and meaning. The core idea of Simpler Syntax is expressed by the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory theory is one that imputes the minimum syntactic necessary to mediate between phenology and meaning. This chapter summarizes the architecture of SS and reviews some of the implications of the SS approach for the analysis of phenomena such as ellipsis, control and raising, argument alterations such as active/passive, and A' construction.

Voice and Ellipsis

“…For sluicing, the licensing head is the complementizer found in constituent questions in English. These requirements can be implemented as structural conditions on a transformation (as in Sag 1976), as a kind of Empty Category Principle-like filter (as in Lobeck 1995 andJohnson 2001), as sui generis restrictions on phrase structure rules or constructions (as in theories like those proposed in Ginzburg andSag 2000 or Culicover andJackendoff 2005), but none of these alternatives are particularly palatable in the more ontologically restrictive theories under the Minimalist umbrella, in which the locus of all variation is posited to be the lexicon. Taking this lexicalist idea seriously requires us to posit a lexical feature or family of features that can encode these requirements.…”

“…The fundamental difficulty is that voice mismatch has an uneven distribution: it is found in some, but not all, kinds of ellipsis. For theories that posit only semantic identity based on entailment relations (such as that of Merchant 2001) or none at all (such as inference-based theories like those of Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, Hardt 2005, and Sag 2006, the puzzle is why voice mismatches should be disallowed in so many cases, since active and passive clauses are mutually entailing and allow for the relevant inferences. For theories that posit syntactic identity (whether implemented as LF copy as in Fiengo and May 1994, Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey 1995, Fortin 2007, and others, or as the trigger of syntactic or PF ''deletion'' as in Sag 1976, Baltin 2012, or otherwise, as in Williams 1977 or semantic identity using model-theoretic equivalences (as in Sag and Hankamer 1984), the puzzle is why voice mismatches are sometimes allowed, given that the syntax of actives and passives is not identical.…”

An Asymmetry in Voice Mismatches in VP-Ellipsis and Pseudogapping

“…One major research tradition posits that ellipsis is subject to a syntactic identity condition (possibly in addition to semantic and other containment conditions) requiring that an elided XP have a syntactically identical antecedent XP′, modulo contrastive elements; works in this general approach include Sag 1976, Kitagawa 1991, Fiengo and May 1994, Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey 1995, Fox 2000 to appear, and many others (works that argue against a syntactic isomorphism requirement include Dalrymple, Shieber, and Pereira 1991, Hardt 1993, Prüst, Van den Berg, and Scha 1994, Ginzburg and Sag 2000, Culicover and Jackendoff 2005. If VP-ellipsis is in fact ellipsis of VP, and if the head that determines voice alternations (and ultimately is responsible for the voice morphology on the verbal head) is external to VP, then we are in a position to understand the fact that voice mismatches are permitted in VP-ellipsis.…”

“…The majority of analyses of pseudogapping (see, e.g., Kuno 1981, Jayaseelan 1990, Lasnik 1995, 1999, Johnson 2001, Baltin 2002, 2003 argue that it involves ellipsis of some verbal projection supplemented by prior movement of some subconstituent of the VP-prototypically an argument DP or PP-to a position external to the target of the ellipsis; they vary mostly in the landing site they posit, the type of movement, and how to account for the cooccurrence restriction with ellipsis (see Takahashi 2004 for a review, and Levin 1978, 1986, Miller 1991, Hardt 1993, Agbayani and Zoerner 2004, and Culicover and Jackendoff 2005. for dissents).…”

Do So and VP

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Do So and VP

Nicholas Sobin Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) argue that VP structure with adjunct modifiers is ''flat'': both complements and adjuncts are equally sisters of V. Their arguments center around the apparent misbehavior of do so as a replacement for a syntactic VP constituent. However, several of these arguments are inconclusive.

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